


...And You Will Remember Us

by alexenange



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Emetophobia, Gen, Implied/Referenced Aone, Kinda, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:24:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,027
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5431283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexenange/pseuds/alexenange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They called them the shadow children, and he's going to kill them.</p><p>This was gonna be a series but I decided to turn it into an original series, so, yeah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	...And You Will Remember Us

The thing about his boss, is that no one would suspect him of being the head of a semi-notorious mafia.

He was soft-spoken, shy, easy to embarrass, and physically tiny, comparatively speaking. When someone first came into one of their speakeasies or taverns, they always thought it was Aone who ran the place, or Futakuchi. No one guessed it was Moniwa. Of course, that was what they wanted. Plenty of people wanted their organization disbanded, so they needed to protect the leader. His anonymity was a valuable asset.

The kids didn’t raise any red flags.

Sure, it was strange to see two kids walk into a tavern, but there was a fair share of street rats in this part of the North. Neither of them could’ve been over thirteen, but both seemed to be well-built. One was clearly muscular, and was wearing a thin black sleeveless shirt over his black cargo pants. The other was slimmer and a little shorter, and wore a similar outfit, but with a hoodie more suited to the frosty weather.

The two had sat down at a table in the back, away from the crowd of rowdy gamblers and drunkards. They had ordered a small appetizer to share, and a few drinks. When Futakuchi walked over to them, they would quiet their voices and avoid eye contact. He didn’t mind, he was used to shady people.

He didn’t notice them slip away. All he would remember was playing a round of cards with the drunkards too stupid to place reasonable bets, then noticing the empty table when he walked away triumphantly. They had placed some coins on the table, and when he went to collect them, his heart stopped.

The coins were not coins, but several small medals, like the kind you would pin through a jacket. On each and every one of them was the insignia of the emperor. On the table, there was a small handprint of soot. The mark of the shadow children.

He shoved the coins in his pocket and rushed back to the kitchen. If he was fast enough maybe they would still be there, maybe he could catch them. But the shadow children were never caught.

Raised in secret by the emperor, the shadow children were lethal assassins who could kill in seconds and disappear without a trace. Few had heard about them, and those who did thought they were nothing more than a myth. But they were real, very real, and he had let them in.

He hesitated a second before going into the room under the main tavern. He wanted to cling to the hope that they really were just a legend for a few more seconds.

But when he pushed the door open, the scene was as grisly as the tales told. Moniwa was barely recognizable from where he hung. He was dangling by his ankles from the low bars across the ceiling, tied there by his own shirt, which was slowly starting to rip. What little they had left of his face was bloated and flushed red with blood. The rest was torn off, and the messy chunks scattered across the walls. In some places, he could see pale glints of bone.

He stepped closer, entranced by the horror. The gouges in his face were rough and irregular, like someone had done them with their fingernails. The bits of filleted flesh on his chest was different, though. His skin had clearly been cut off with a knife. It was done expertly, so his muscle was still holding itself together, and he was barely bleeding. The longer Futakuchi stood there, the grayer Moniwa became.

He just couldn’t find the strength to move.

He wanted to retch, to vomit, to purge everything he had just seen from his mind and body. He wanted to fall to the floor and heave until nothing came out but bile and blood. But all he could do was stand there and stare. He wanted to forget, but he knew he never could.

-

 

He hated closing his eyes.

Every time he did, he’d see… _Them_. Those taunting faces growing more and more warped with time because _he let them in, he let them kill Moniwa._

Every time he went to sleep he’d wake up with a hoarse throat and a pounding heart, sheets stinking of his cold sweat. His friends stopped coming in to check on his screams after the eleventh night. They knew what he had seen. They knew they couldn’t help him.

_He had reached out and touched it, repulsed by the strengthening stench of his rotting corpse in the small room. He was acutely aware of every centimeter of his body, all tingling with a nervous itch. He wanted to scrub his skin until it was bloody and raw and didn’t smell like death anymore._

_But he couldn’t, not yet. He had to take down the body, wrap it in a bag, prepare it to be burned. He had to scrub the floors and the walls and clean up the pile of skin at his feet. He had to do that much for Moniwa._

He pinched the bridge of his nose as he swallowed the pill. It stuck in his dry throat and made him want to gag, but he suppressed the urge. After a few minutes, the headache went away and he could breath without smelling _that room_ again.

For a while all he wanted to do was die. He thought that that would be the only way he could forget, the only way he could be forgiven. But he was wrong. He would not forget, not long into death. The only way he could keep existing was to repent for what he did. He needed to get stronger, find the shadow children, and kill them.

He found names.

Bokuto and Akaashi.

Finally, names to the faces that followed him. Names to match the hands that tore apart his boss’s flesh and hung him from the ceiling. The hands that skinned him and decorated the walls with his blood. Names to match the ones he was going to kill.

He was going to kill them.


End file.
